If you happened to be looking up at the moon on March 17th, you may have thought you saw a bright flash. It wasn’t your imagination.
NASA has just released a video of a lunar impact that took place in March that was bright enough to see with the naked eye.
Ron Suggs, an analyst at the Marshall Space Flight Center was the first to see the impact in a video recorded using a 14-inch telescope.
Bill Cooke of NASA’ s Meteoroid Environment Office reported that the impact was 10 times brighter than the office has seen previously. The object is believed to be the size of a small boulder.
The impact may have been part of something larger; that same day, NASA and the University of Western Ontario’s all-sky cameras picked up a high number of “deep-penetrating meteors” on Earth. They believe that the orbits these meteors were travelling was the same orbit between Earth and the asteroid belt, which lies between Mar and Jupiter.
Because the moon has no atmosphere, meteors don’t burn up as they do on Earth.
There have been 300 meteor strikes documented on the moon since 2005.
NASA continues to analyze the impact.
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